[MD] Reason, Tradition, Absolute Truth

[Matt Kundert]

Ian,

Ian said:
I see us "refining" an approximate tradition / reason distinction, and 
better defining both reason and tradition in the process (using social / 
intellectual language), but are you saying it's SOMist to consider a 
distinction on this axis at all ?

If you are, I suspect we really just have a lingusitic definition problem 
somewhere.

Matt:
Yeah, I suspect we are having definitional issues, and that's part of the 
problem I'm trying to untangle.  People have been fighting over how we 
define "social" and "intellectual" for a long time, and fighting over them, 
it being a bad or good distinction, all depends on how we unpack the terms.  
So I'm trying to suggest how one way of unpacking the distinction, i.e. 
making it look like the Enlightenment's  Reason/Tradition distinction, is a 
bad idea.  But everything's muddy in the area so its hard for me to get a 
handle on other people and vice versa.

So, on the one hand I'm not saying that it's bad to consider a distinction 
on this axis at all--unless the axis itself depends on the Enlightenment 
dichotomies.  Or to put it another way, clearly there is something that can 
be distinguished between the terms "reason" and "tradition" and 
"intellectual" and "social".

What I consider to be a bad way of distinguishing them is to say that 
"reason" is seperate from "tradition" and that some traditions make more 
room for reason than others.  A tradition is what it is because it has a 
system of reasoning internal to it.  Reason is distinguishable, but internal 
to a tradition.

A related way is to distinguish between social and intellectual is to say 
something like "social is what we do with other people, like in politics, or 
at work, or at a bar" and "intellectual is what we do when we are alone, 
like in mathematics, or philosophy, or a physics lab".  This rings true to 
Pirsig's description of intellectual as essentially abstraction.  We can 
abstract in total isolation from other people.  We don't need input when we 
are just manipulating abstract symbols, basically just a logical game.  I 
think this way breaks down, too.  I don't think its very hard to see that 
"intellectual" is a stand in for "philosophy" (look at the way Pirsig places 
its "birth" in Greece).  But then we get a series of dichotomies like this:

Social / Intellectual
Politics / Philosophy
Rhetoric / Dialectic
Sophists / Platonists
Consensus / Truth

But if people agree with "Absolute Truth" bit I talked about with Platt 
recently, then the dichotomy between the search for Consensus and the search 
for Truth is spurious and ill-fated.  Plato created that distinction because 
he thought the Sophists were just out to convince people of things.  Plato 
didn't think people being convinced would tell you if it was _true_ or not.  
That, in hindsight, is _correct_, but consensus is the only lead on truth we 
have.  Justification is the only criterion we have for truth.  They aren't 
the same, but they aren't distinct projects either.

So I'm not sure whether that connects up at all with the way you conceive 
the "approximate tradition / reason distinction".  Saying there approximate 
suggests to me that you'd unpack it differently than I have.  The way I 
unpacked them to disperse the Enlightenment dichotomy was basically as 
reason-as-thinking and tradition-as-an-historical-pattern-of-thinking.  
Basically analogous to a philosopher arguing and the series of previous 
philosophers the current one picks out as his forefathers.  Like, Rorty 
writing PMN versus Rorty in relation to McKeon, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Dewey, 
Whitehead, Hegel, Hume, etc.  Rorty makes it obvious that he stands in a 
tradition of thinking.  Pirsig doesn't.  But whether you do or not, you 
couldn't help it just as you can't help but stand somewhere in history.  I 
think the fact Pirsig disowns almost all traditions of philosophy, and calls 
his own a radical break, might be a subtle indication of something like this 
bad tradition/reason distinction.

Matt

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